The Books That Influence Olivia Laing
To celebrate the release of their new novel, The Silver Book, the author shares a list of literary works that have inspired them
To celebrate the release of their new novel, The Silver Book, the author shares a list of literary works that have inspired them
I’m not given to visions, but I had one in Venice a few summers back. I was leaving the city when I had a very clear image of an encounter between two men by the church of San Vidal, at the edge of Campo Santo Stefano. One was a beautiful, red-headed English boy and the other was Danilo Donati, the costume designer and art director who helped realize the visions of Pier Paolo Pasolini and Federico Fellini. I saw what passed between them as a coup de foudre, an instant attraction that would derail both their lives. This was the beginning of The Silver Book, a love-story-cum-thriller set in Italy in the mid-1970s. It’s about the making of two strange and scandalous masterpieces, Fellini’s Casanova (1976) and Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), a reworking of the Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom (1785) and the director’s final film before his still unsolved murder in 1975.
John le Carré, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (Penguin, 1963)
The desire to write a thriller started here. This was the first Le Carré I read: a no-expectations paperback I shoved in my pocket before boarding a flight to New York a decade ago. It opens with a man waiting for someone to cross the Berlin Wall into West Germany. The tension Le Carré creates is astounding. He writes in an odd, elliptical English, so you are always attempting to winkle out the real meaning through ciphers and code. He uses spare, technical language as a way of generating great, grimy clouds of claustrophobia and paranoia. The plane cabin receded and in its place was a frightening London, a site of nasty, complex machinations. I’ve never forgotten the plummeting feeling I had as I realized in the final pages how the titular spy had been played; how the person who thought he was the master of a situation understands he is the pawn, the deceived knave. It’s the twist to end all twists, an exercise in totally destabilizing the reader.
Edward Carrick, Designing for Films (Studio Publications, 1949)
I live next door to a nonagenarian artist who comes from an unusually illustrious theatrical and artistic family. His great-grandmother was the actress Ellen Terry and his great-grandfather was Gaetano Meo, a favoured model of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones. As for his father, Edward Carrick was an art designer for cinema who in 1941 wrote what would become a key text for film and design students for decades ahead. In those days an art director was a kind of magician or alchemist, producing illusions from the most unlikely of domestic items. I used John’s battered blue copy of Designing for Films as a way of figuring out what kinds of tricks Donati might have deployed in his workshop at the Cinecittà studios in Rome, in the years before CGI and AI made this type of human ingenuity almost obsolete. Carrick’s recipes include using feathers and rolled oats to make snow, broken mothballs to create hail and sugar as a stand-in for glass. Ice? Water sprayed with paraffin wax.
Gary Indiana, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (BFI Publishing, 2000)
With every new horror story from Trump 2.0, I miss Gary Indiana more. America’s moral conscience and most brilliant – and brilliantly pissed-off – critic died far too young. Of all his books, this is my favourite. If Pasolini’s apocalyptic final film is about the possibilities of fascism and the dangers of compliance, this is an intensely lucid extended essay that mines it for meanings of many kinds. Indiana had a pretty strong stomach and as a kid working in a cinema in Los Angeles managed to see Salò every night for almost two months, so that it became a kind of unhappy waking dream he lived inside. No one else has done such a sharp job of decoding the famous shit-eating scene, which Pasolini once declared was about mass consumption under capitalism (the shit, by the way, is chocolate). Despite all the horror films made in the intervening years, Salò remains, in Indiana’s estimation, ‘proscribed, unacceptable. One can argue with its monotony, its internal inconsistencies and its didacticism, but its power to disturb something buried very deep in each of us is beyond question.’
Pier Paolo Pasolini, edited by Jack Hirschman, In Danger: A Pasolini Anthology (City Lights, 2010)
On 2 November 2025 it was 50 years since Pier Paolo Pasolini was beaten to death on an area of waste ground in Ostia, near Rome – purportedly by a hustler, though this was almost certainly the cover for a targeted assassination by criminals connected to the far right. Pasolini is best remembered now for his films, but he always regarded himself as a writer and poet first. This short collection brings together the fierce and eerie prophecy of his late journalism alongside poems, some self-indulgent, others piercingly spare and beautiful in their self-knowing. ‘Help, loneliness is coming on. / Never mind that I know I’ve willed it like a king’, he writes. More than anyone of his generation, Pasolini understood the kind of world that was coming. Salò was his warning, as was the final interview he gave, on the afternoon before he was killed, reproduced in full in this book. In it, he describes in detail the ugliness of the unrestrained capitalism he saw spreading inexorably across the world. He saw what it would turn into, too. The word he used was hell.
Olivia Laing's The Silver Book is published by Hamish Hamilton in the UK and is released on 6 November 2025
Main image: Portrait of Olivia Laing. Courtesy and photograph: Sophie Davidson
